Longshot Space
IPO CLUB Research · Space & Defense
Status: Pipeline, diligence open Stage: Seed Founded: 2020 Base: Alameda, California
Longshot Space: can you launch cargo into orbit from a gun?
Longshot Space Technologies is building a ground-based accelerator, in plain terms a very large gun, that uses staged injections of compressed hydrogen along a barrel of 600 metres or more to push a projectile to hypersonic speed. No first stage, no propellant on board for the hardest part of the climb, and the energy supplied from the ground rather than carried. If it works at full scale it removes the most expensive part of reaching orbit. If it does not, the physics that stops it is specific and measurable, which is why we have put our own arithmetic on this page rather than repeating the company's.
IPO CLUB covers Longshot in its research pipeline because the near-term business is not orbital launch at all. It is hypersonic flight testing for the US Department of Defense, a market that exists today, is funded today, and needs more shots than the current test infrastructure can fire.
What Longshot Space does
A conventional rocket spends most of its mass carrying the propellant that lifts the rest of the propellant. A gun inverts that. The accelerator stays on the ground, is reusable by design, and the energy that would have been chemical propellant becomes compressed gas stored in fixed infrastructure. The projectile carries only what it needs after it leaves the barrel.
The engineering problem is that a single push of gas has a speed ceiling. Gas expands behind the projectile, the pressure falls as the projectile moves away, and a single-injection light-gas gun runs out of useful push at roughly two and a half kilometres per second. Longshot's answer is multi- injection: a long barrel with many injection points, each firing in sequence as the projectile passes, so fresh high-pressure gas keeps arriving behind it. That is the part of the design that has to be proven, and the part everything else depends on.
The company was founded in 2020, started with a garage prototype in San Jose, and moved to Historic Alameda Point in 2026. Mike Grace is co-founder and chief executive, with a background in biology research at NASA Ames and service as a US Army combat engineer. Nathan Saichek is co-founder and chief technology officer, with roughly two decades in aerospace. Mark Bigham, previously chief innovation officer of Raytheon's Intelligence and Information Systems business, leads defense programs. Alex Stroud, a former SpaceX propulsion engineer, heads engineering.
Longshot Space stock, valuation and funding
Is there a stock?
No. Longshot Space is a private company. It has no ticker symbol, it is not traded on any exchange, and no IPO has been announced.
What is the valuation?
IPO CLUB does not publish one. The company has not announced a priced funding round, and we do not treat the terms of a convertible instrument as though they were a valuation. If a priced round is announced publicly, this page will carry it.
How much has it raised?
About twenty million dollars in total, according to the company's own announcement in June 2026, most recently in a round led by South Park Commons. That figure is better supported than the third-party database totals, which do not agree with each other.
The physics, computed by IPO CLUB
Published accounts of kinetic launch tend to repeat the company's figures or dismiss the idea outright. Neither is useful. Below is the arithmetic we ran from first principles, using only public figures, to establish what a gun launch can and cannot do. These numbers are ours, rounded, and they are the reason we take the concept seriously while remaining precise about where it is unproven.
| Question | Our figure | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Speed needed for orbit | ~7.8 km/s orbital ~9.3 km/s total |
A projectile fired from the ground falls back unless something burns at apogee. The gun replaces the first stage, not the whole rocket. |
| Acceleration, average, v²/2L | ~130 g at 5 km/s over 10 km ~245 g at 8.5 km/s over 15 km ~310 g at 7.8 km/s over 10 km |
Peaks run higher than the average. No people, and no conventional satellite, which is typically built for under about 10 g. |
| Energy per kilogram | 36 MJ at 8.5 km/s ~10 kWh |
About one dollar of grid electricity per kilogram. A ten tonne shot is roughly 100 MWh. Energy cost is not the barrier. |
| Peak power through the barrel | 30 to 100 GW | A 10 km barrel is crossed in under four seconds. That power cannot be drawn live, so it must be pre-stored as pressurised gas and released by thousands of precisely timed injectors. This is the engineering core. |
| Air resistance at the muzzle | 15 MPa at 5 km/s 44 MPa at 8.5 km/s |
Dynamic pressure at sea level. A large projectile sheds roughly 110 to 320 g on exit. This favours heavy, dense projectiles and high-altitude sites. |
| Kick stage propellant share | ~40% for +1.5 km/s ~75 to 78% for +4.5 km/s |
Muzzle speed sets the economics. Near 8.5 km/s roughly half the projectile can be payload. Near 5 km/s it falls to something like 10 to 20 per cent. |
Figures computed by IPO CLUB from publicly reported design parameters and rounded. They describe the physics of ground-based kinetic launch in general, not a Longshot design, and they are not company figures.
What Longshot Space has actually demonstrated
This is where discipline matters. The company reports a six-inch accelerator that has fired more than one hundred shots and reached Mach 4.2. That is roughly 1.4 kilometres per second.
So the demonstrated speed is a fraction of what orbit requires, and the multi-injection scheme has not been publicly shown to beat the single-injection ceiling. A larger thirty-inch accelerator broke ground at Alameda in 2025. Until side injection is shown above that ceiling, on the record, the orbital case rests on simulation rather than test data. We treat it that way.
The public government record
Longshot has won real defense research funding: a Small Business Innovation Research Direct to Phase II award in 2021, and an Air Force Research Laboratory Tactical Funding Increase in 2024. In December 2025 the company joined the Mettle Ops team on the Missile Defense Agency's SHIELD contract vehicle.
One correction to how that last item has been reported. SHIELD is an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity vehicle: a position on it is a licence to compete for work, not work itself. The announcement discloses no task order and no obligated funding, and the headline figure attached to SHIELD in press coverage is the ceiling of the whole programme across all awardees, not money awarded to Longshot. Anyone reading that number as Longshot revenue has misread it.
What a gun can and cannot carry
Acceleration, not speed, defines the market. At the hundreds of g a gun imposes, the list of viable cargo is short and specific:
- Can fly: propellant, water, oxygen, bulk metals, structural elements, construction aggregate, and electronics hardened for artillery-grade shock.
- Cannot fly: people, conventional satellites, optics, deployable solar arrays, and anything built to the roughly 10 g limit standard spacecraft are designed around.
That is a narrower market than launch in general, and it is the honest constraint on the company's long-term story. It is also not a trivial market: propellant and water are the heaviest, dumbest, most repeatedly-needed mass in any sustained orbital operation, and they are exactly what you would prefer to fire from the ground.
Why nobody has done this before
Gun launch is not a new idea, which is both the strongest argument against it and the most useful context for judging it. Governments and national laboratories have attempted ground-based launch at various points since the middle of the twentieth century, and none of those programmes put a payload into orbit.
What is instructive is why they stopped. The obstacles were funding, politics, the speed ceiling of a single gas push, and timing precision that the engineering of the day could not deliver. Physics was not what defeated them. At least one of those constraints has genuinely changed: timing thousands of valves to microsecond precision is now an ordinary control problem rather than an exotic one.
What has not changed is the capital requirement and the shape of the market. A full-scale orbital system means multiple kilometres of fixed infrastructure, with land, permits and a fixed firing azimuth that limits which orbital inclinations a single site can reach. Meanwhile rockets kept getting cheaper, which is the quiet reason most gun-launch efforts died.
The nearest contemporary attempt is SpinLaunch, which spins a projectile rather than firing it, imposes something closer to ten thousand g, and has since pivoted toward operating its own satellite network.
The launch squeeze, and why timing favours new capacity
Demand for launch now exceeds supply at the small end. SpaceX will book its last rideshare missions in late 2028. Rideshare priced a ride at about seven thousand dollars per kilogram to sun-synchronous orbit in 2026, and the cheapest US small rocket flying today costs roughly twice that. Those figures come from IPO CLUB's own launch pricing research. Customers are queuing.
This is the part of the thesis that needs care. A queue for rideshare does not become revenue for a gun, because the satellites in that queue cannot survive the acceleration. The squeeze matters because it funds the industry's appetite for alternative capacity, and because it makes g-tolerant bulk cargo a more interesting proposition than it was when launch was merely expensive rather than unavailable.
The market Longshot can serve at today's demonstrated speeds is different and nearer: hypersonic and missile-defence flight testing. Every hypersonic programme needs repeated shots at representative speeds, and the current way to get one is to expend a missile. A reusable ground accelerator that can fire frequently is a direct substitute, and it is where the company's existing defense funding points.
Funding and investors
Longshot has raised approximately twenty million dollars in total, according to the company's own announcement in June 2026, with the most recent round led by South Park Commons. The disclosed investor group also includes Draper Associates, Starship Ventures, SpaceFund and Sam Altman as an angel.
IPO CLUB does not publish a valuation for Longshot Space. The company has not announced a priced round, and we do not substitute an instrument's terms for a valuation, so there is no number here to quote. If and when a priced round is announced publicly, this page will carry it.
What we are still testing
The open questions in our file
- Has multi-injection beaten the single-push speed ceiling in a real firing, and at what projectile mass?
- One consistent orbital design point: muzzle speed, barrel length and resulting payload fraction, with the arithmetic shown. Public interviews have quoted several, and they do not reconcile.
- Which revenue is recurring test work and which is one-off research award, and whether any funded task order exists under the SHIELD vehicle.
- Where a multi-kilometre orbital site would be, who owns that land, and what permits it needs.
- Who on the team or advisory bench has designed and fired large high-pressure gas systems before.
Diligence is open. This page is updated when our research changes, not when the company issues a press release.
Where Longshot Space sits in IPO CLUB research
Longshot is in the IPO CLUB research pipeline, classified under Space and Defense, mapped to the Space Industrialization and Hypersonic Advancement megatrends. Diligence is open and no allocation is offered in Longshot.
IPO CLUB members can read the full Longshot research card, including the diligence file as it develops, in the Data Room. Become a member to access the Data Room.
How to get exposure to this theme
There is no individual Longshot deal to join. Accredited investors who want exposure to ground-based launch, hypersonic testing and the wider space industrialisation theme get it through America 2030, the diversified private-company fund that holds the positions our research pipeline produces. One subscription, one set of documents, and a portfolio rather than a single bet on one piece of physics working.
Related private companies
IPO CLUB covers other private US space and defense companies in its research pipeline: Reflect Orbital (orbital sunlight delivery), Castelion (low-cost hypersonic strike), Varda (in-space manufacturing and re-entry), Saronic (autonomous surface vessels) and CesiumAstro (active phased array communications).
Longshot Space: frequently asked questions
What is Longshot Space?
Longshot Space Technologies is a private American company, founded in 2020 and based in Alameda, California, building a ground-based kinetic accelerator. It uses staged injections of compressed hydrogen along a barrel of 600 metres or more to drive a projectile to hypersonic speed, with the aim of replacing the first stage of a rocket with reusable ground infrastructure. Its near-term business is hypersonic flight testing for the US Department of Defense.
Can you really launch satellites into orbit from a gun?
Not conventional satellites. By IPO CLUB's own calculation, reaching orbital speed over a barrel of practical length imposes average acceleration of roughly 130 to 310 g, and peaks higher, while standard spacecraft are built to withstand around 10 g. A gun can plausibly launch propellant, water, bulk metals, structural material and shock-hardened electronics. It cannot launch people, optics or ordinary satellites. A gun also cannot reach orbit on its own: a projectile fired from the ground falls back unless a small stage burns at the top of the arc, so the gun replaces the first stage rather than the whole rocket.
How many g does a gun-launched payload experience?
Average acceleration is the square of muzzle velocity divided by twice the barrel length. On that basis 5 km/s over a 10 km barrel is about 130 g, 8.5 km/s over 15 km is about 245 g, and 7.8 km/s over 10 km is about 310 g. Peak loads exceed the average, and the projectile sheds a further 110 to 320 g decelerating against the atmosphere as it leaves the muzzle at sea level. These are IPO CLUB calculations from publicly reported design parameters.
Has Longshot Space actually fired anything yet?
Yes. The company reports a six-inch accelerator that has fired more than one hundred shots and reached Mach 4.2, which is roughly 1.4 kilometres per second. A larger thirty-inch accelerator broke ground at Alameda in 2025. The gap between the demonstrated 1.4 km/s and the 5 to 8.5 km/s discussed for orbital launch is the central open technical question, and multi-injection has not been publicly shown to beat the single-push speed ceiling of about 2.5 km/s.
Who has invested in Longshot Space?
Longshot has raised approximately twenty million dollars in total according to the company's June 2026 announcement. The most recent round was led by South Park Commons, and the disclosed investor group also includes Draper Associates, Starship Ventures, SpaceFund and Sam Altman as an angel investor.
Does Longshot Space have a stock ticker?
No. Longshot Space is a private company with no ticker symbol, not traded on any exchange, and no IPO has been announced. There is no Longshot Space stock to buy through IPO CLUB or through a public broker, and any offer of Longshot Space shares should be treated with caution.
What is Longshot Space's valuation?
IPO CLUB does not publish a valuation for Longshot Space. The company has not announced a priced funding round, and we do not present the terms of a convertible instrument as though they were a valuation. If a priced round is announced publicly, this page will be updated.
Who are Longshot Space's competitors?
In non-rocket launch, the closest contemporary effort is SpinLaunch, which accelerates a projectile centrifugally rather than with gas, imposes acceleration closer to ten thousand g, and has pivoted toward operating its own satellite network. Ground-based launch has been attempted before by government and national laboratory programmes, none of which reached orbit. In practice Longshot Space's real competition is the falling cost of conventional rockets, which is what ended most previous attempts. In hypersonic testing, its competition is the current practice of expending a missile for each test shot.
Can I invest in Longshot Space through IPO CLUB?
No. There is no Longshot Space allocation and no Longshot Space offering. Longshot Space sits in the IPO CLUB research pipeline with diligence open. Accredited investors who want exposure to ground-based launch, hypersonic testing and space industrialisation access it through America 2030, the diversified private-company fund, rather than through a single-company deal.
Sources
- Longshot Space, company page: longshotspace.com/company
- TechCrunch, 13 October 2026: Forget rockets, Longshot wants to fire cargo into space from a gun
- South Park Commons, June 2026: Investing in a Longshot
- EO Magazine, profile of Mike Grace: eomag.io
- Sirotin Intelligence, interview with Mike Grace: sirotinintelligence.com
- SHIELD IDIQ announcement, 9 December 2025: Longshot joins Mettle Ops team on SHIELD IDIQ
- FedTech, on Mark Bigham: fedtech.io
- Launch pricing and rideshare availability: IPO CLUB, Who Launches After SpaceX (14 October 2026).
- Physics figures: IPO CLUB calculations from the public design parameters above.
Prepared for informational purposes only. Not investment, legal or tax advice, and not an offer, solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security. Longshot Space Technologies is a research pipeline company. No allocation in Longshot is offered. IPO CLUB and America 2030 are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of Longshot Space Technologies. Information may be incomplete or become outdated and no duty to update is assumed. Readers must perform their own independent diligence.
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